Long-term Data Retention: Challenges, Standards and Best Practices

The demand for digital data preservation has increased drastically in recent years. Maintaining a large amount of data for long periods of time (months, years, decades, or even forever) becomes even more important given government regulations such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, OSHA, and many others that define specific preservation periods for critical records.

While the move from paper to digital information over the past decades has greatly improved information access, it complicates information preservation. This is due to many factors including digital format changes, media obsolescence, media failure, and loss of contextual metadata. The Self-contained Information Retention Format (SIRF) was created by SNIA to facilitate long-term data storage and preservation. SIRF can be used with disk, tape, and cloud based storage containers, and is extensible to any new storage technologies. It provides an effective and efficient way to preserve and secure digital information for many decades, even with the ever-changing technology landscape. Join this webcast to learn:

• Key challenges of long-term data retention
• How the SIRF format works and its key elements
• How SIRF supports different storage containers - disks, tapes, CDMI and the cloud
• Availability of Open SIRF

SNIA experts that developed the SIRF standard will be on hand to answer your questions.